17th Views from the Avant-Garde Lineup Announced

Today, the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced the lineup for Views from the Avant-Garde (“Views”), taking place from October 3 – 7 during the 51st New York Film Festival. This is the 17th edition of Views, which has grown into one of the foremost showcases of experimental film in the world. Curator Mark McElhatten returns to head the program, which contains over 35 works in various formats, including Super-8, 16mm, and 35mm film, as well as digital formats.

McElhatten commented on the program’s importance in terms of format, film history, and artistic integrity: “Views celebrates Cinema in its material marriage with film, in its honeymoon period with an ideal medium, projecting super-8, 16mm, 35mm, sequential slides. We celebrate the lightning fleetness of digital that is able to translate the cinema of consciousness in a way than is very different than film, giving it a different elasticity and a different body. We are screening work that ranges through the ethnographic, abstract, psychological, documentarian, essayistic, devotional, parotic, scientific-naturalist many different impulses and directions along with the latest archival preservations of rediscovered works from earlier decades. The goal is to offer a festival of works that is evidence of true exploration coming from individual impulse, showing what can happen when exceptional artists absent themselves from the concerns of a consensus commercial aim and authentically pursue the limits of their art.”

On opening night, Views will screen the North American Premiere of Lois Patiño’s first feature Costa Da Morte, which just won an award of distinction at the 66th Festival del Film Locarno for Best Emerging Director. Filmed in a region of Galicia, Spain, called the “Coast of Death” due to the numerous shipwrecks that have occurred in this region, the film witnesses the traditional craftsmen who maintain both an intimate relationship and an antagonistic battle with the vastness of the territory.

Let Your Light Shine (Jodie Mack, 2013)

The closing day of Views features programs that seeks to dissolve boundaries in the way we categorize and approach cinema of different origins and highlight works by John Stahl, Max Ophüls, Stan Brakhage, and Nathaniel Dorsky. The festival will conclude with Dorsky's Kodachrome Dailies from the Time of Song and Solitude (Reel 2) , which includes unreleased material being screened for the first and only time to a public audience.

The new documentary out of Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab—the filmmaking group behind previous New York Film Festival Films Leviathan (NYFF50) and Sweetgrass (NYFF '09)—Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez's Manakamana will be co-presented by Views from the Avant-Garde and was previously announced as part of NYFF51's Spotlight on Documentary section Motion Portraits. The film will screen on September 28 and 30 with the filmmakers in attendance.

This year's lineup features 45 new artists as well as several mini-retrospectives of work by Aura Satz, Lois Patiño, Sandro Aguilar, and Jean-Paul Kelly. Views will also offer special tributes to the late Stom Sogo and Anne Robertson, whose work is a testimony to the power of a cinema that is fearless, original, and inextinguishable. Many other familiar names grace the lineup, including Stephanie Barber, Kevin Jerome Everson, Ernie Gehr, Miguel Gomes, Jerome Hiler, Peter Hutton, Chris Marker, Luther Price, Raúl Ruiz, Phil Solomon, and Travis Wilkerson.

Views fanatics can gain access to all 34 programs in the lineup with our $99 all-access badge, which will be available for purchase exclusively online. The badge, as well as tickets to individual programs, will go on sale on September 12. For now, you can check out the full lineup and schedule for Views from the Avant-Garde by heading to the press release.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center celebrates American and international cinema, to recognize and support new filmmakers, and to enhance awareness, accessibility and understanding of the art among a broad and diverse film going audience.